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The disaster investigation team concluded that three of the bolts used to secure the tail section were counterfeit and inferior to the parts that should have been used. The metal in the bolts was not strong enough and failed when resonant vibration occurred in the auxiliary power unit.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnair_Flight_394#Investigation

.001" tolerances aren't as tight as you'd think. I'm a (very novice, mind you) CNC machinist and I regularly deal with parts machined with a +/- .005" tolerance on all dimensions. Even mil-spec parts with critical dimensions still allow +/- .0005" to .001" tolerances. That sounds tight, but with modern machines, it just takes a bit of patience.

Hell, the machine I run is from 1987. Old as shit, but pretty precise when it wants to be.

I'm a manufacturing engineer for a medical device company. We deal with 5 tenths tolerances all the time. People tend to be picky about the quality of things that are getting implanted into their bodies.

Generally though if we see a .0005" tol from a design engineer we will ask them to open it up for production if it is deemed not critical for function.

machinist here verifying BOB...5 tenths is tough...maybe hard milling is doable, or with some badass Makino machines...but even a good Mori Seiki will have a little trouble holding 5 tenths all day on any feature. We've done it though, but usually tenths are ground and not machined.

Back in my shop days it was fun whenever we had to machine a piece of Vespel to those tolerances. It was so expensive that the shop managers made the CNC guys bring it to QC after every single feature. Drill a hole, bring it to me. Drill the next hole, bring it to me. I hated trying to measure a radius with those tolerances.

INteresting...I would think that unchucking and rechucking would hurt your chances of a tight tolerance. For us and our machines, the best thing we can do is do as much machining in a single chucking. That's why our Y axis lathes, and 5th axis mills are such studs...you can let the machine do what it does well, and remove human error or discrepancies in the fixture that make close tolerances hard to attain.

Doesn't matter. I worked on submarines and did a lot of QA on Subsafe parts. Subsafe is basically the sister system of the same QA controls that NASA has.

If I lost a bolt on a subsafe system, could I go out to Ace Hardware and buy the bolt for 50 cents? Sure. Could I talk to a CNC machinist and reproduce that exact same bolt (with same tolerances) for $50? Probably.

The reason these things are so expensive has nothing to do with tolerances, but because of the QA controls, tracking, and guarantees. That $119 bolt as seen in the photo was created from a specific metal from a specific distributer. Batch numbers are recorded and stored for life. The machinist who cut the metal is on file. The person who inspected that bolt is on file. Every single bolt from that batch was inspected singularly (1 of every 1000 bolts are inspected in that ACE Hardware bolt). Each one is shipped individually and stored as controlled material.

Also, is the ACE Hardware bolt fully tested and guaranteed to survive mach 2? The controlled bolt is. Is the ACE Hardware bolt fully tested and guaranteed to not shear under test depth pressures? The controlled bolt is.

When and if that airplane goes down, it might be determined that this bolt sheared and it was the cause of the accident. With these expensive controls in place, if you determine the failure to be a bad batch of stock metal, you can go back and trace every single bolt that was created from that block of metal and cross reference it to what inspector passed it. Those faulty bolts are found and replaced from every single airplane to prevent another multi-million dollar loss.

Sorry wakestrap. You do understand the CNC process, but it's only a very small fraction of the total cost.

Edit: I'm not claiming that the system is perfect and that there are no abuses by shady people ... just that the QA aspect can easily turn a $1 bolt into a $100 bolt. Corrupt people can turn that $100 bolt into a $1000 bolt, quite easily I may add.

This needs more upvotes. I see this all the time with the Navy. We're buying processor cards that are around 350mhz and 32 mb of ram and cost about $1300 a piece...not for their amazing technology, but for the assurance that they will survive a torpedo exploding on the other end of the ship and still keep the vital systems running so the ship can survive.

I'd actually suspect that the reason for the high cost of that embedded system is long term supportability. The company that supplied that part has to guarantee replacements for say 10 years. We do the same, so for every part we sell a customer, there is a matching product sitting on a shelf going unused waiting as a replacement. You literally end up paying for two even if you only receive one. That and as you say, it's expected to be extremely rugged.

as an aside.. i used to work for an aerspace parts manufacturer. We worked hard to get some work from Boeing, and when we were finally approved as a supplier our QA guy asked them to send a copy of their quality manual. a full 4x4 skid packed with binders turned up.

Seriously. QA and certification for military and aerospace agencies are no joke. Anything not specced out and certified as such is an unknown. When lives and millions of dollars are at stake, "unknown" is not an acceptable answer.

It's not tolerances. It's the grade of the materials. The strongest bolts from Home Depot is like butter when compared to a high end tool steel. There's a reason you put Home Depot bolts on your kid's bike and custom machined bolts on the space shuttle.

Just because the tolerances are there doesn't mean its aircraft grade. Even for an experimental aircraft, if I want to use hardware store bolts, I have to prove to the DAR (the person who will give or deny me the airworthiness certificate) that they meet or exceed the standards for an aircraft grade bolt.

There is a lot more inspection of these bolts and a lot more testing to make sure each and every one meets the specs. Not so with walmart junk.

Now, does this justify the cost? Only partially. The other is the fact that it is "aircraft grade" But even then, the artificial price inflation aside, they do cost a fair bit more than standard run of the mill bolts.

I used to work on the software for dealing with getting parts like this at a NADEP, where guys like this worked on F-18's. The way things are priced is so beyond ridiculous there is no justification.

One example, the price ultimately paid is not the same as the price when you order it. There have been cases where the price of a part tripled between ordering and receiving. The military pays the delivery price (not the ordered one). I wrote the code to deal with all the crazy rules for the system.

There are hundreds of reasons for the cost of that bolt, and none of them have to do with the cost of making it.

then you simply go to another manufacturer if you care about costs. The government purposefully feeds selected manufacturers though and that is why it's called a "military-industrial complex". You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

In a lot of areas that have verifiable costs - essentially procurement, assembly, etc - there's far less graft than you'd think in terms of pricing.

One of my coworkers used to be in the Air Force, and was very high in their logistics chain, TS/SCI clearance, the works. His job was to watch for this stuff, find suspicious transactions and report them to people that take this stuff very seriously. He had back-end access to all but the most deep-black systems out there, and even 10-20 years ago they had pretty powerful tools for analyzing and searching the logistics DBs for questionable activity.

When I asked him about what the deal was with all the fraud/waste/abuse going on that "everybody knows" happens, he explained that most of the real shittiness happens at the manufacturing and dealmaking end - either suppliers set up in a place that doesn't care if you abuse your workers, or the deal is structured in a way that the manufacturer can default at any time w/o penalty, deliver sub-grade materials w/o penalty, etc.

Also, the "research" areas can be very shady; that's both where a lot of graft can happen because there's no guaranteed products or costs to verify, as well as where you can hide the shuffling of funds into the deep-black ops that you don't want getting around.

Of course, this is pretty dated; I'm aware that our procurement methods for black ops is much more sophisticated now, and we contract out a lot more of our forensic accounting to "trustworthy" firms (you know, the ones that did such a great job with Enron...). I'm just letting you all know that the military really isn't as retarded as most people think; it's just that the "common sense" approach doesn't work well with such a complex beast as our military.

Which is why in november/december all the cars/trucks/tanks on the base were burning fuel/diesel 24h/24 at idle even the night. January 1st they say "wow we didn't have enough fuel last year, we need more $$$ for this year".

After the USS Thresher went down the US Navy started a program called SUBSAFE. The parts that are certified as SUBSAFE have gone through many review processes, for instance the metal in every screw is tracked from when the ore is mined to when it shows up at the boat. The shit is amazingly expensive but crews of boats trust our lives to the quality of these parts.

For a commercial aircraft, reducing its weight by 1kg results in a yearly economy of 3000$ worth of fuel. If this screw is 10 grams lighter than the ordinary one, and you are flying that F-16s every day, it can pay back for itself over the course of something like 4 years...

Maybe (I'm too lazy to check the stats) but that doesn't take away from the fact that this bolt only cost the manufacturer $0.10 to produce. They slap the MIL-SPEC label on it and all of sudden you can charge whatever you want. I've worked on military contracts which required us to upgrade all our components to mil-spec and if you went down to my lab and looked at a military grade connector housing vs a regular housing you couldn't tell the difference. One goes through a more rigorous Q&A process but they're the same part. The military industrial complex has created an entire market who's prices don't reflect the value of the product.

Hey there, I work for a government contractor. First no, it did not cost .10$ to make, custom bolts like this are not mass produced in a factory the same way regular bolts and screws are. And secondly, thats not taking into consideration the facto that hundreds of engineers worked to design that bolt, a bolt that would only be bought a couple hundred times or more, along with the plane it fits in.

Yes it is just a bolt, but its part of something larger, that cost millions if not billions of dollars to develop.

Edit: Ok, I didnt mean that hundreds of engineers were there to specifically design just the bolt, but the bolt is itself a very specific part of something that 100's of engineers worked on, and by proxy, decided the design of.

Ugh, no hundreds of engineers did not design that bolt. A more accurate statement would be "That bolt designed itself". An engineer was given a set of forces (max shear, elasticity etc...) which dictate the dimensions, threading and material required. Sure small production runs will increase costs but bolts are cheap to produce thanks to CNCs. That bolt is nothing more then a bit of round stock titanium (or whatever material it happens to be) feed into a CNC lathe. I'm an engineer that does ALOT of small production runs and I've worked with mil-spec. It's priced at that point because the military budgets are just so damn high that no one cares what it costs. The REASON that plane costs Hundreds of millions of dollars to produce is BECAUSE most of the components are outrageously priced. I would expect an increase in costs but it really is out of control. As an example the regular connectors we use cost - $2.50 a piece while the Mil-Spec version (same technical specs and environmental operating characteristics) was $34.50 a piece.

Well that is pretty steep. But when your boobs are on the line I think those rigorous quality assurance protocols we all pay for are quite cost effective in the long term. I award you a no bid contract without congressional oversight immediately.

I would go on to say that anyone who has dealt with the MIL specs and sellign to the military knows that a small part of the cost is in the part itself...the rest is in RFID tags, super stringent packaging codes, and 200 pages of specs you have to read to make a simple bolt. The govt is tough to work with, and if you miss one thing, the whole lot is rejected, whether the parts are good or not. It has gotten to the point that the govt and DOD can't get parts because people don't want to step into that arena. I can speak from experience that it is really hard to sell parts to the government, even if you are well skilled in making the parts themselves.

Yes thank you, came here to say the exact same thing as you and my dad are in the same line of work (he owns a manufacturing facility that does custom complex parts in small orders (i.e. not millions of parts per order).

That's good to know. If it's the same part then it's foolish to spend that much more. I could understand if it's a short run made out of an exotic material and has tight tolerances so you're tossing out 75% of what's produced because it didn't meet spec.

There is the real money problem. The government goes through great lengths to make sure what they buy is priced at what it costs, but they buy a lot of stupid shit to begin with.

A story i can remember that always stuck to me is a contractor in Afghanistan doing laundry for 100 dollars a load. Yeah, thats a lot of money, until you factor in how much it costs to keep civilians in a war zone to do this kind of work (hundreds of thousands each), the problem isn't that the contractor isn't spending that much money, its that the soldiers should just do their own damn laundry.

Maybe (I'm too lazy to check the stats) but that doesn't take away from the fact that this bolt only cost the manufacturer $0.10 to produce.

Not everything that gets manufactured costs pennies to produce. I used to audit an alloys company that made small pipes out of exotic metals for food processing centers and companies like coca cola. Some of those allows cost hundreds of dollars PER INCH of pipe.

If that screw is made out of some sort of alloy that has to go through strength testing and analysis before it goes to the military, it could be costing the manufacturer $50 to produce. I'm not joking.

And you don't just "slap mil-spec" on something and sell it. Do you have any idea how much testing mil-spec parts have to go through before they're approved? For mission critical parts, they get looked at by EVERYONE down the chain and it adds tons of cost to the product.

The other point I want to make is... so what? What if that screw costs $5 to produce in the factory, you still have overhead, distribution costs, testing costs that might add up down the supply chain. When people quote things like "oh that CD only costs the producer $1" they ignore ALL of the fixed costs that have to be supported to produce the item.

If a $120 screw will save the airforce thousands of dollars in fuel costs over the life of the aircraft then why do you care?

It was actually quite interesting to audit those facilities because the materials used are these ridiculous alloys that stand up under tremendous pressures, PH balances, etc.

The companies claim to fame was that they made parts for the Apollo project. They actually had a piece of one of the Apollo moon missions in a vault that only the owner of my firm was allowed to see. It was pretty wild.

I work for a company which makes the kind of alloys you are talking about, and all I van say is, the more specs the stuff has to meet, the more expensive it is not necessarily to produce but certainly to test, document and certify. Just making the jump from regular use (e.g. products at home base or similar) to aerospace products for civil programs brings a great increase in the kind of work which takes trained techicians and engineers to do (why? because if the engine is hanging on this screw, lives are literally in the balance). Adding military specs just complicates things even further.

I'm sure there's more to it than just slapping a label on. The company probably has to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be able to supply the military with parts. I'm sure they have to do all kinds of paperwork and meetings before they even sell the first screw. They have to make that money back somehow so bam, $120 screw.

Exactly, companies like military business, and like making them happy. If it was as simple as popping one out of a box of a few thousand, they would probably give it to them for free just for the good faith.

My father worked in aircraft design, and the rationalization he always gave me for things like this was the extent of the testing that needs to be done to fully understand the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF). I.e. it could be that the bolt will survive 4000 hours of flight time and then needs to be replaced, 'cause at hour 4001 the probability of failure due to material fatigue starts to climb.

As a rule of thumb, creep becomes a concern at temperatures above half of the homologous melting temperature. Where is it mentioned that this fastener is for high-temperature service? Did I just miss that?

Creep is a different phenomenon from fatigue.

It is not true that all materials will fail over time; at sufficiently low levels of stress, ferrous alloys have an infinite fatigue life.

Lastly, when referencing other people's comments, please permalink to them.

Sorry for using bullets and sounding curt. This was not my intention, I just chose to do so because I felt too lazy to think up enough different transition words.

So I went and did a quick survey of the literature, and it seems that you are correct that high stress and high temperature cause creep; however, I am not presently aware of any practical considerations of creep due to high stress at low temperature, so I'd be appreciative if you could provide some examples/references; I'm always happy to learn new things.

I'm not satisfied by the explanation you gave of creep in fasteners, as what you are describing sounds more like embedment, especially since you mention vibration as a cause. Embedment is due principally to the fact that even "flat" surfaces have microscopic surface roughness which can result in localized yielding at the contact points, and it is not the same mechanism as creep. When I did some work with fasteners, we only needed fasteners made from creep-resistant alloys for joints that saw very high temperatures, such as turbocharger exhaust joints. For regular joints, the rule was "don't exceed the proof load" and steel worked just fine.

As for infinite fatigue life, the literature generally cites steel and titanium as examples of materials with fatigue limits. My old textbook shows the S-N curve for mild steel going horizontal at ~38 ksi. Wikipedia's article on fatigue limit, however, says that "recent research suggests that endurance limits do not actually exist, that if enough stress cycles are performed, even the smallest stress will eventually produce fatigue failure." So I'm not 100% certain either way, I just know that if nothing else, the logarithmic S-N curves for ferrous alloys show a distinct "knee" whereas S-N curves for nonferrous alloys such as aluminum are very gentle curving.

No one here has talked about the tensile or shear strength of materials? Who knows what that one particular screw is for. Maybe its a screw made of whatever material that allows it to reach several hundred degrees without any meaningful degredation. C'mon people... At least ask for some information on the picture.

I think there are two explanations for the inflated cost of that one screw:

1) because it has to be machined to extremely precise tolerances and with almost 100% consistent repeatability. For that, you need advanced methods of threading, other than rolling and tap and die. Two very expensive but precise alternative methods I could think of are selective corrosion, whereby the threads are literally corroded off the blank using electrical discharge and EDM

2) Assuming the screw is made of some material that's harder yet lighter material than stainless steel (let's say, inconol or some superalloy), then that would jack up the price of the screw.

The one thing I find very odd about this whole deal with the very sharp corners at the thread base and the outer diameter of the screw head. That, according to my 4-year degree, is bad design 101.

I can't speak to hospital goods, but given sanitation and sterilization concerns, I can see relevance here, parallel to my data recovery business. For 90% of my business, I charge a fairly low rate, but anytime I have to do business with a doctor, lawyer, or government, my cost triples due to all the paperwork.

We all hate paperwork, and sometimes it feels like bullshit busy work, but about once a year, some fuck up happens proving why it's done when it matters. For most consumer customers, we pretty much "just do it" and only leave enough notes in the system such that another tech can complete the work if the first guy gets hit by a bus.

For the others, though, we have to maintain meticulous chain of custody documents. Who held the drive. Who did the work. Who was in the room at the time. What tools were used. What did they do with the drive, if anything, each time they walked out of the room. Blah blah blah.

If a legal issue arises, someone will inevitably call our work into question, and this is the only way to defend against it. Of the few customers who need this, only a small percentage wind up using it, and I've only. Been to court once, but the stakes are high enough that it's not optional.

If walmart changes its bag formulation to a plastic that's no longer hypoallergenic, you probably don't want to be the person who ran that errand........

It's more than that; tort only applies to civil cases, but we have the same deal with criminal cases. If I'm doing work for the prosecution, I have to provide all the same documentation so that my work doesn't introduce any reasonable doubt simply due to my methodologies.

This is (or at least used to be) true in the phone company where I worked. If a part was needed and not readily available then a drawing was either made or on file and sent to the shop for manufacture. The total cost could be astronomical. The justification was usually 'time is of the essence'.

Also, milspec parts often have to go through required testing before delivery. I'm not sure if that is still the case, but I would assume so.

I certainly wouldn’t argue that point. It is inefficient. Sometimes, however, efficiency is overridden by an unexpected or unplanned requirement. Even with good planning, there are extenuating circumstances.

There may be factors that play into it that aren’t immediately obvious. (I’m speaking of fair-costed parts not shenanigans.) For example, stored and/or ‘stale’ items. I don’t know if the bolt discussed here falls into those, but some parts do.

A customer might not wish to keep stock in specialized parts but rather pay the manufacturer to provide them as required. They may be rarely needed parts or replacements for older things. Those parts may also need periodic testing and replacement as time passes in order to have one available on demand.

THen again, an hour to set up a lathe, a $5 for material, some time to check the part, and process the paperwork, $119 seems reasonable. I am a machinist and process planner, and if you had to buy one of these made from scratch, this isn't a bad price. You could go lower by using a mom and pop shop or a guy with a lathe in his garage who might not have the overhead of a bigger shop.

The economy of scale would really cut down the price though.,..i would think you could own 5 of these for not a lot more than the price of 1 of these.

The machine has to be setup, programmed, and run. Where I work, our machines cost us almost $80/hr. After it's ran, it goes to inspection, then plating (even for a passivation dip), then back to inspection before it's packaged and shipped.

I'd say you got a fair price not even considering the tests (possibly destruct) the production lot has to go through to prove it meets spec.

You probably could have gotten the 10 pieces for nearly the same price with a price break.

My boss, a pilot, went on a rant about the costs if planes and plane parts.

On top of manufacturing and quality assurance, there is a lot of insurance involved in case something breaks and causes fatalities. Blame goes in the following order: pilot, maintenance crew, manufacturer.

That's not how it works. If you need one of those screws, you can't just buy one. You have to requisition one. If someone has already ordered a bunch of those, then you get sent one of theirs. If not, they you have to pay $119 (or whatever the cost is) for a bunch of them. It's like going to the store and purchasing a box of screws. You're not paying $7.50 for the one screw you need, you're paying for the box of screws. Now, if anyone in the house (or the base in the case above) needs one of those screws, they take one from the box. Nothing is simple.

I bought a bolt that holds a brake cylinder on my car. It was grade 8, steel, and 2 inches long, and certainly mass produced. Cost from dealership $15. I personally do not think that $120 is out of range for a fairly custom, probably exotic alloy, certified fastener. There is certainly a lot of waste with the gov but I dont think you found it here.

I also know a lot of car mechanics and electronic repair people who would say the same thing about the wages paid for the private sector wrench turners on gov aircraft. How much did you charge the gov for the 15 minutes it took you to install that $120 bolt?

There's a reason this stuff costs so much. Weight savings, tolerance, specific load values, engineering costs, and the ability to be allowed to create and sell milspec products all come at a hefty cost which must be recouped.

The square end of the slot up near the screw's head is really confusing to me. It doesn't look like a feature that can be produced by cutting or forming. It is probably an Electrical Discharge Machining feature, and being sinker EDM'd is what makes this part so expensive.

A typical, every day aircraft screw & washer like that still only costs a few cents or a few bucks.

Just imagine how difficult it was to engineer this screw (job). The defense industry is out of control, President Eisenhour warned us about the military industrial complex and as a former defense industry worker, I can tell you that they milk DoD for all they can.

Welcome to the world of aviation. It's not just the Air Force. If you own a plane, be prepared to spend at least 10x more on any given part than what you'd pay for a similar item from the hardware store. There are a few reasons for this, some good and some not.

Certification and paperwork. You can't just sell aircraft parts out of the back of your truck, you need to get the appropriate approval. This does not come cheap, and ultimately the buyer pays for it.

Specialty. Many of these items are not quite identical to what you'd find in a hardware store, due to having special alloys, etc. Because volumes for aircraft parts are so small, the per-unit price goes way up.

Testing. Even if you buy a bolt which is literally identical to one you'd find in the hardware store, they don't get treated identically. The hardware store bolt comes off the assembly line, goes into a bag, and gets sold. The aircraft bolt goes through rigorous testing to detect defects before sale. A hardware store bolt can have a 1% defect rate without a major problem, but an aircraft bolt needs to be more reliable, because if it fails, people probably die.

Many of these seemingly absurd costs make sense once you look deeper. The famous $500 "toilet seat" was actually an entire molded fiberglass assembly. The famous $500 hammer was a specialty non-sparking hammer intended for use in an explosive atmosphere. That's not to say that there is no waste or price gouging, but it's not as bad as it may appear at first glance.

Certification costs are HUGE. I was a tech writer on a project to convert a particular model of airplane to a cargo conversion. It probably took the owner 10 years to get it certified from beginning to end. It's absurd but it means safety in the end.

That and you could probably suspend an F-250 truck from the ceiling off that bolt

The material that that screw is made from is likely the high strength Stainless Steel alloy A286 or Titanium. Both those material have insanely high tensile strength and cost a lot because the are not made in huge batches like common hardware store grade screws. Screws like this are made one at a time, by hand.

There is also a slot cut into the length of the screw. The tolerances on that slot are certainly within a thousandth of an inch (.001"). Then there is the heat treatment and surface finish.

Additionally, there's a chance that the threads are designed oversize or undersize to compensate for a plating process in the mating hole or nut. More $$.

Certification is not bullshit, it assures the screw is made from the material it should be.

If it were the single screw keeping a wing on, I could see it. But it's a screw that holds a cover on. Which there are 4 more on the part. And an unreasonably low pressure with a screwdriver is enough to break it.

First of all... it is a bolt, not a screw. I have worked in the aerospace industry in the past and every bolt I ever fitted had to be tightened to a very specific torque range and/or tolerance. If you are breaking the part when fitting it, it is either faulty or you are doing it wrong.

I have a friend that makes shims for Bell-Huey helicopters for the US Armed forces. His factory makes one thing, a shim about the size of a dime. They are machined to within 1/10,000 of a millimeter. I saw a box about the size of a shoebox in his garage full of shims once, and I picked it up and chuckled; "This is what your company makes? Are you kidding?" His response...,"that box is worth about $250,000."

Hardware now is mostly made in China. Limited quality control and the cheapest of metals are used. Screw heads will strip out, bolts will break in the middle You build something ,say a large second floor deck attached to a house. Your customer has a party and it rips away from the house injuring and killing the quests. You may wish you ordered made in USA bolts rather than the shiny ones from the big box store. Half the homes in the states have these issues now. From door knob to roof top, hardware will fail. I wish the company that made this screw bolt produced hardware for all of us.